The Ancient Battery People Once Thought Was a God

If I told you we were about to talk about one of the world’s earliest batteries, you’d probably guess it was a pretty crappy battery. And you’d be right! 

Known as the “Baghdad battery,” it’s a relic from the Mesopotamian age that produced such little electrical charge that there’s debate over whether it can really be called a battery. Not that it made much difference, since it’s not like they had anything to plug into it. In fact, it’s the combination of the obvious lack of electrical devices and the sheer dogshit-ness of this ancient battery that’s led to historians trying to figure out just what the hell the Mesopotamians used it for anyway.

One possibility is that it was for electroplating, which seems implausible. I mean, it’s a clay jar with a copper cylinder and iron rod inside that could be filled with any available acid in order to produce a whopping singular volt of electricity. Also, given that we’re talking about people that stumbled onto the idea of the world’s weakest battery, the fact that they then skipped to electroplating is hard for me to believe.

There’s another theory, though, one that I thoroughly enjoy — namely, that the battery was used in religious rituals to convince people that they were feeling the touch of the divine. In reality, what they were feeling was about as sacred as licking a 9-volt battery. Still, especially for a civilization that had no idea what electricity was, it doesn’t take much to create a sensation that achieves the goal of somebody saying in Mesopotamian, “Okay, what the hell was that?”

There’s no concrete evidence to back up this theory, but it feels a lot closer to possible to me, in large part because it thrives on a complete lack of knowledge on how to use the device. All it really needs is someone building a weird jar, getting hurt by it, and, as was so common back then, immediately connecting it to a deity of some kind.